


bottom of the river

by Anonymous



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Angst, Bliss (Far Cry), Gen, Psychological Horror, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:35:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: If she wasn't broken then, Eden's Gate won't break her now.(Archive 2018)
Relationships: Deputy | Judge & Mary May Fairgrave
Kudos: 4
Collections: Anonymous Fics





	bottom of the river

The Bliss - the places Faith takes her, the illusions spun, the long and feathering stalks of green grass and the mist in the air veiling everything enough, just enough, to smooth all rough edges and soften all impact - that place is just a little too unreal. When Faith stands too close, slips her warm fingers through the deputy's, when the world swoops and shifts around her like a softly fairy-dusted hand is remaking it with a joyous yet purposeful wave - 

That, that isn't as hard for Rook to fight. In the moment she's often dizzied, swept along, her senses drowned and dominated. But it doesn't tug at her when she's out. It makes her...it makes her _angry._ Angry like Jacob's violations and red-washed cages make her angry, the two of them reaching into her head with bloody hands to pluck at the neurons there, rasping and tugging at her. They make her feel like a puppet on red strings built of her own tendons and nerves, twitched to and fro. And from deep inside her, that raging animal in her gut - the one that dragged her out of that house, the one that snarled and gnashed and had never let her be blissfully puzzled as to how you could cut off your own limbs to be free of a trap - rose up.

The funny thing is - and she thinks about this part, she thinks about it too much, fists crushed into her stomach as she tries to sleep in an abandoned bunker or a borrowed bed at night, her body exhausted but her mind still stewing and sparking with nerves - she'd be in a lot more danger if they were less heavy handed.

Not real danger from inside: not danger of turning, of joining, of _believing._ She clings to that. Clings to that bitter fighting thing inside of her, that core like tinfoil between the teeth. As long as she's alive and they're out there hurting people she'll fight them. She's seen too many angels, weeping sores above their milky eyes, once-mothers and once-fathers and once-sisters and brothers, now just...bodies, stumbling, barely on their own power. She's seen too many melted blackened bodies in the remnants of indifferent pyres and charnel pits in the mountains, too many dying or dead animals, set on each other and people or just used until they collapsed, raw scarlet spots of bald skin striping their now unmoving sides. Too many haunted, broken open homes in the valley where blood tells a story as it smears out down the steps. Peggies with manic eyes and flayed, barely-healed patches of mutilated skin permanently displayed.

No. She's not - she can't be - she won't be weak, she won't give in. She's not that child anymore, so afraid not even of the pain but of the uncertainty, the terror of waiting for the pain, that she'd do anything to make it stop. If she wasn't broken then, Eden's Gate won't break her now.

She won't. She won't. She _won't._

She woke up twenty minutes ago. The bliss fogs her mind, creeps silky and cool into her veins and threatens to make her float into the air, makes her weightless. It takes her a long time to collect her thoughts. A peggie rocket went astray. The truck exploded. Her ribs throb, soft and vicious. She must have been thrown down the hill, and she rolled into the mud near the river and near empty green barrels left by the cult.

Right now, right here, she struggles to stand. Her body aches, hurts, is slow to respond; but then it does, and the hardest edges of the pain are carried away by the drugs.

She's in the river already. Her staggering footsteps have taken her knee-deep. The water's slow moving here. Rook slips her fingers beneath the strap of her rifle and tosses it back towards the bank. She's already lost her sidearm. Somewhere.

She breathes in deep and wonders if this is what Faith feels like to people who don't already know better. But that's not fair, is it. She sways on her feet. The water's cold around her thighs now, and the sun bakes the back of her neck. Sticky strands of hair cling to her cheeks. She closes her eyes.

A more honest question would be: is this what Faith's promises feel like, eventually, if there's no helping hands to drag you out of the green, no Jerome to tug you free of that van, no Eli to cut your bonds and promise you, voice low and warm and rough, that the Whitetails have got you, that you've proven yourself a damn valuable part of the resistance. That you're not alone--that maybe, maybe the fight can be won.

If no one can find you in time, is this what giving in felt like? Freedom?

In the end that's how they get you - isn't it. The uncertainty. The weight of helplessness, of terror, no matter how many triggers you pull or friends you patch up. No matter how many lives you save, there's always someone falling under the wheels or the fire. One week you help set a teenage girl's shoulder as she grins at you, pupils dilated and shirt soaked in sweat from the pain, and makes you promise not to tell her dad. The next week she's bald and glaze-eyed, lesions ripping across her freckled cheekbones, gnashing and snapping at you like an animal as three people pin her down and you beg her to recognize your voice.

Or you find her in a cage in front of a camera, dead two days, barely recognizable after the drugged and maddened judges were set on her. Oh, how Jacob likes his cameras.

And if you just pledge yourself to the Father. The woman Whitehorse still calls Rookie bends, scoops up water to splash on her face, closing her eyes.

_If you give youself up to Eden's Gate._

You don't have to doubt again, do you? Grace says deep down they know what they're doing is wrong. But Rook knows too well how good humans are at erecting their smokescreens, their justifications. How good they are at distracting and consuming themselves with them. And it isn't just pain or fear that brings people to the cult's fold. Oh no, Joseph has his _true believers._ For some of them simple release from basic human worries and internal conflict was enough. If you give yourself up to Eden's Gate, you can surrender yourself to the promise that everything is justified, in the end. You need not doubt or question or fret. A collapse is coming. Humanity must survive - especially if they survive under God and Joseph's thumb, in cells or in Eden's Gate insignia.

She doesn't believe in Joseph's truth. She doesn't believe in his faith, in his reasons. But most of all she doesn't believe in the better future he promises, the holy guidance. Eventually reality will sink back in, and you're an Angel or a prisoner or just a shattered woman.

She stands in the river, her eyes closed. And even as she trips and rambles through all her own defences, she knows this weightlessness would be their greatest weapon if they were smart enough to use it. After all these years and all these fights big and small words and fists her brain still surges in response to the carrot after the stick, the lull after the heavy hand, the moment when you're so grateful for the cessation of fear and pain that the mere lack feels like an immeasurable act of generous kindness rather than a pause before the next wound.

Faith is too heavy handed. John, too, holding the mask and crown of saviour over his own proclivities, his own rat maze. And Jacob, well, maybe Jacob would bother to figure it out if Jacob was interested in much more than breaking things until they're suitable blunt weapons.

Rook thinks, ' _if they took me to the river and let me breathe in Bliss and slipped my head under the water--told me it would all end here, and there would be nothing but peace - I proabbly wouldn't even fight. I might even walk into the waters myself. Give me just enough._ '

She closes her eyes and digs her fists into her stomach. She knows that for the first time in a long, long time, for no particular reason that she'll name, she's crying.

Someone speaks, she thinks, their voice running together like her head is underwater too. And again, and on the third shout the words resolve themselves into clarity. "Deputy! _Deputy_ , what the hell?"

She turns. Water lapping at her hips now, pulling at her. She's braced against a leaning tree trunk. Did she find it, walk out along it? Or did it save her in absolute oblivion?

It's....Mary May Fairgrave. For a moment Rook blinks, sure she's completely hallucinating. But Mary May plunges into the water, stretching out her hand. "Come on," she calls, almost shouting. "Take my hand and come on back, Deputy. Come on, take my hand."

Rook reaches out for her. Her own cold, wet fingers slap into Mary May's hot clutching grip and she discovers all at once that she needs the help to return. They stagger out of the water together, the current pulling so much more heavily on her than she had felt going in.

"What are you doing here?" Rook says, bemused.

"What am _I_ doing here?" Mary May rakes wet blonde hair out of her eyes, staring incredulously. "I was going on a gas run, and they asked me to run by since you dropped out of radio contact. I can't believe I even spotted you," she adds, quieter. "I almost didn't." She hesitates and then her eyes rove back up to Rook's face. "Deputy, what were you doing?"

It's not a wholly rhetorical question, but the look in Mary May's eyes isn't of total bafflement and it isn't of condemnation. It's...concern, but there's also a sharp edge of knowing grief. And, Rook thinks, of understanding. What was it like, living for years under the shadow of Eden's Gate? How many friends had she seen get swallowed, nevermind her family? Hard to ask many of the others. Jess in particular wore her coping mechanisms with such vicious pride.

"Thinking about mistakes," Rook says, taking in a deep breath. "Past and future. Thanks, Mary May."

Mary May smiles at her, her eyes still full of shadows but her grip warm and strong as she reaches out, quick and light, and squeezes Rook's shoulder. "Any time," she promises.

Rook believes her. It's not the airy and infinite promise of the Bliss, but it's honest. It's real. And it matters more than distant heaven, dripping as that comes from the mouths of Eden's Gate.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit rough, but it's also very much an exorcism and purging-of-messy-emotions-via-fanfiction, and it's also the first story, even short as it is, that I've _finished_ for a little while, so I'm happy.


End file.
